--- K E V I N   V A R R O N E

No word is dirty in itself. In general, dirt lies either behind words or between them.
Amos Oz, The Hill of Evil Counsel


11.3 awoke (siesta) w/you (my glottal noon heart, my little omega-2). w/you, a thought, sotto
voce, gravlax, & lactose intolerance. awoke a stranger, in a plane landing (salted peanuts), breaking the plane
of the mason-dixon, funky chicken, hyberbole on my teeth. walked out into the microscopic foam. activated
wonder twin powers (shape of a dog in space).

11.4 first task upon arrival: go to underlined places. find absolute location of chewy center. much to see,
much to do. won't breathe city in. won't let friends impose on me. will work calmly & silently. mind
of winter. eye of the tiger.

11.5 many days are autumn now. many are autumn & have known that sadness. feeling, at best, like a faint,
16th magnitude object (so many theories, so little reconciliation). black-eyed suzies & calinectus sapidae.
another jejeunal tuningfork. ice melted. dreydl my eggo.

11.6 small tenders of patience tea requires. you think you'll get maybe a paragraph & it turns into war &
peace (so it is w/national fig week). not far from here they whisper sweet nothings to the hubble.

11.7 a shot starts atop the tower then roulettes to the fat end of the taper--smooth when it hits
bottom--then the meatball rolls out the door. if I were a tad more I'd hop a mobtown junket, tie one on
w/the gatsby dogs & midday dames de la nuit, fix bayonet against the flow state, glow like a satellite.

11.8 lost a misshapen hour on the doctrine of equal opposite force. have reviewed & agree to your wrath of
god caveat. contemplated my navel for the nonce. there's no objective answer. my face is squashed. I'm like-minded
with the downspouts.

11.9 lingua iwo jima. graffito in loo: mick don't like bladder mouth. your mom is a sphere.

11.10 quanta, quanta, quanta. if a tree falls & the shoe fits. we've gone to stranger places. time's arrow
shot through a narrow pane of light in the cracked torso of an hour.

11.11 dear e, here is how a place becomes no place, how a story bites its tongue (a gutteral not spoken, a
dactylic qu'est ce que c'est). the clause doth oft proclaim the meaning. a little jingo me-too-ism, a little
lumpen proletariat.

11.13 juncos in delmarva. err in the daisy chain. locals swallow the spirant con gusto, except the nasals & the
liquids, the sound of german ch. here are the diacritics for phlegm in the throat, the initial consonantal why.

11.14 fed ex hazmat ped xing: ylang ylanged my eczema & tachycardia. my final ultimatum:
choose abstinence or practice safe linux.

11.15 oolong hoopla: my oblongata leapt up, looked out (my cuspids & bicuspids, my atopic ooze
clarified in a tiny teapot and a tiny teacup). a tongue called mammon! took it like a man.

11.16 it wasn't you among the tattoos queued at the pit beef stand. it wasn't you cloaking ex partae whispers
in dipthongs (so we couldn't see your party lines). day stole another day. a girl made a churchfront clasping
a pizelle in the rafters of her thumbs & pointers. nous verrons ce que nous verrons. coute que coute.

11.17 wanna be my rare bronze salt & pepper monkey? wanna be my cheesehonky?
(look up, e, leonid peaks like a schvitz.)

11.18 I'm still a gopher for your ho-ho legalese, a hippo for your jagged tersa rima (mind the precedent).
my falutin hovers (still) round the mendoza line. (on november 18th, 1883, the western union time ball
dropped twice in new york city: eastern standard, local solar: a sunday of two noons.)

11.19 don't ask which of us or whom will pay the del mem toll. my heart's donkey brays for thee.

11.20 wordshy in the chucklepatch. my own personal bejesus. no more than a squawk in a henhouse, a frag of
mawkish pronoun stuck in the teeth. sparrowort, fish, crosier, flag. a red herring plummets through the
finity. my gait forgets the sidewalk's idiom. shortcuts undo my shoelaces. what I know may keep me from
sky. what I heard was first jot of the ave from a choirloft. here comes the nostos full bore.

11.21 different geography, same lily rash (same pencil-in-cup deformity). same intervals twixt nothing &
wow, winged. left the city though it still had my lungs. senseless as a preemptive lightbulb change.

11.22 thus correctly rendered: who moved my flutter? who moved my geez? (aorta in the cortex, e, neither of
us can handle the truth). dear city, hello, it's me again. I asked you once for salvation & you sd œelsewhere I ask 
again b/c the dragon is upon us.

11.23 dear melancholialia (my little hawaiian iamb). all the missives are bound in caulfat, lard-tied and
propped on the scrubbed marble steps of your misbegotten youth. painted screens cut close to the bone.
nonetheless, saw the rose st. of your jonka, the bank st. of your bucsia. somewhere heaven is a city humming
all the songs we've lost in tunnels.

11.24 novum vetus vinum bibo; novo verteri morbo medeor. (my brumal lust for summer bounty; basil, que
te quiero basil). I said sea food, meant great food, meant mute aesthetics, wish you were here & all that.
who can say abt the weather, who can say much abt causality, a dog limping over rock salt, a pair of chuck t's
looped across a powerline?

11.25 place. displace. replace. mise-en-blanc. I miss the void. three cities in a bathtub. a rubber duck, an S-cookie
(the private kindnesses). remember to remember me. noon, lorna doones. stella d'oro, stella artois
(minor keys for minor locks, all). is there no man of honest report?

11.26 alpha foxtrot biscay filton bristol. concorde flies no more, e. aur revoir, needlebird. c'est bon.

11.27 time hovers unmeasured. my kingdom for a public clock. or a sentence to realize this thinking. the
words want for sequence, scoring in time & space. a small, transient fleck of communion. a star wandered off
from night, or a piece of light slanting off space.

11.28 valgus shift in the calcaneous causes a lateral shift of the achilles. midday bel-loc balto landmark
breakfast anytime. eggs over easy (though you'd tend toward the suns still shining). there are many types of
tea & oolong is one of them. if you come, please bring the ocean. if not-please-some other salinity.

11.29 winged & ramping through the palindrome hour (an aviary flying & falling through the mirror
world). the heart is not a funhouse. noon is not an hour for recklessness, for the feckless among us bandying
baroque facades of sentences across a diner counter. there are two types of people in the world. there's a bright
science outside.

11.30 quiet & the sound of things. pauses rise & the hour slips its joint. the penninsula makes a perverse
geometry. everywhere, threads of anecdotes tangle in arranged marriage. a theory of strings. in each caesura
the world is an oyster. sorry I dropped the pax.

12.1 days march toward order or lack meaning. it isn't that nothing happens, it's noon, the tongue w/out
brain, brain w/out words, words w/out percussion cap to trip the scant detonations. there's a stone, you see.
we launch things & occasionally they come home to roost.

12.2 tree's fallen but sparrows come to it still: sometimes, earth curves in our favor. lip service of desire.
today, a tiny cinema of want & wonder, a super-cooled liquid epiphany: autumn is how despair sounds
beautiful. autumn has only 1 lung.

12.3 my scholia al dente slips the word-strung mackerel sky. semi-vowel glides. ennui rider. mulch the vocab.
make hay while you're still willie mays, as the barometric pressure girdles & dodos us, our inept parts. who
wants to go faster? who wants to go backwards? another devastating migration. another nest made from
flimsy twigs. c'est la vie. dual interfaces are de riguer.